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Seeking a little wedding drama, minus the trauma

Think cutting the wedding cake with your sweetheart -- like Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow did in 1966 -- is a darling moment? Think again. Modern newlyweds will pay caterers roughly $3 a slice to cut and serve a wedding cake. That's in addition to the cost of the cake itself. (AFP / AFP)

By Corina MilicSpecial to the Star

Thu., June 16, 2011

I’m heading into my third hour of a Say Yes to the Dress marathon on TLC.

The reality show that follows brides choosing the perfect wedding gown at a New York bridal store has gained deeper meaning in the weeks following my own engagement.

In fact, I’m losing sleep over whether my fiancé and I should have a Christmas-themed wedding or a winter themed one; photos before or after the ceremony; and what colour my bridesmaids should wear. I’m panicking over whether the gown I’ve bought really is “the dress” as Kleinfeld consultant Randy Fenoli asks every bride on the show, until, in hour three, the questions, the dresses and the decisionsthey have blurred into a giant, tulle-enveloped ball of expectations bearing down on me.

I can see this is a problem, but I’m struggling not to get sucked into the bridal vortex of matching table linens and chocolate fountains.

I, and other brides like me, want to be traumatized by our weddings, according to Rebecca Mead, author of One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.

Mead says people need a wedding to be traumatic because that’s what it used to be. It signalled a transition to adulthood, the start of your sex life and leaving your family. Today, in Western culture, a wedding is rarely any of those.

But the trauma still exists.

She blames a wedding industry worth billions of dollars for much of this trauma. Her book tracks the so-called marriage industrial complex at its overblown and tacky worst. For her, the industry preys on romantic delusions, billing a wedding as the most important day of a bride’s life, selling cheap sentiment and little else.

Needless to say, Mead was married in a New York City courthouse in 2004, wearing office clothes.

Getting married is expensive. Canadian weddings cost on average $23,330, according to a 2011 WeddingBells magazine survey of 2,000 brides. That includes $1,798 for the average wedding gown, plus thousands more on must-have items like doves to release, monogrammed napkins, and separate brides’ and grooms’ cakes.

Speaking of which, do you know how much it costs to slice a wedding cake?

The going rate in Toronto is $3 to cut a slice, plus a flat fee for the caterer (whom you are already paying thousands) to cut and serve your cake (for which you have already paid hundreds).

I feel like the wedding industry has sold me an inflated line and I have no choice but to buy it.

Not quite, says Bridget Farr, founder of First Kiss Films, an Ottawa-based company that specializes in super 8mm and 16mm wedding films.

She defends industry pricing, saying with a limited number of preferred days to be married each year, the “wedding season is short and competitive.” Plus, the pressure to make your big day perfect — or in her case, capture your big day perfectly — falls on the shoulders of service providers.

She observes that much of a bride’s emotional and financial stress comes from trying to impress people.

“The reason most brides-to-be get overwhelmed is they treat their wedding like a spectacle or a performance,” says Farr.

It’s not.

But if my fiancé and I decide to forgo the performance, skip the trauma, decide we don’t want the wedding of if not ours, then someone’s dreams, then we have to decide what we do want.

And that’s even harder.

I’d rather not obsess over details (flowers or feathers? Red or purple bridesmaids’ dresses?) or stay up nights calculating $3 slices of wedding cake into our budget. But I’m also not going to the courthouse one afternoon to get married quietly.

Can we buy into some of the wedding industrial complex and call the rest for what it is, ridiculous?

Truth is, I would love one of Farr’s vintage films of my wedding. I want the veil and the champagne toasts. I want to celebrate. Because while this isn’t the most important day of my life, it is going to be a very special one — the first in fact — that signals the end of my life and the start of ours.

Corina Milic is writer and editor in Toronto. She'll be married this December with a little fanfare and a whole lot of friends and family.

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